Manuscripts! Bookstores! Baseball! Summer Readin’…

Five more summer reading books to enjoy

By David Podgurski

Five titles! Once again we let Sheila Daley’s Barrett Bookstore in Darien, along with a recent, special guest of the shop, lead the way in getting some dynamite summer books into your hands—turning pages and breaking sweat the old-fashioned way: staying up all night to finish a good read…

Barrett’s Robin Harvey says that "The author, Tom Rachman, is amazing.” And a famous writer who visited Barrett last month for a signing, Christopher Buckley, sums the book’s plot up nicely: “You MUST read (it)…it’s set in a small used bookstore, in Wales.” Nuff said—of course, Harvey recommends Buckley’s own recent collection of essays, “But Enough About You” as a stellar read.

This is, Harvey says, "A re-imagining of Margaret Mead and her time in Samoa; a fictionalized account ... inspired by the events ... with a LOT of buzz." The locale is different, but readers will find much to be entertained by this Lily King novel, set in New Guinea.

This New Yorker compilation/meditation profiles that crucial decade's most fascinating figures, with excerpts from the magazine. It is a “key present for any of the members of the Greatest Generation,” Harvey notes. “We’ve been selling a lot of these.”

A memoir by the Yankees’s ace closer, Mariano Rivera, has been selling like crazy, and is popular no doubt "probably due to Father's Day..." Harvey says, but also simply because of baseball season, the New York team’s popularity, and, well, have you SEEN Rivera’s stats???

Chris Pavone’s mystery/thriller about “a manuscript for a book that will ruin the lives of many people,” is a particularly interesting and gripping read, according to Harvey. A genre page-turner, with the whole New York-Europe connection, as well as all that you look for in summer reading, here we have a good yarn with nifty characters, and plenty of tricksy action.